Where is the future of AGILE/distributed AGILE development heading to?
Finally, the most important question, where is the future of AGILE? Can we expect to keep this iteration-based, fast-paced and collaborative set up for the long run? Let's find out! Every year, there is an Agile conference where the future of both AGILE and the research into this topic is discussed. There are several talks and workshops that discuss the advnaces each group have made from a research or a industrial point of view. The participants are mainly a mixture of industry professionals and researchers. Certain areas of interest are chosen every year that are considered important to the field by a panel and the various participants will discuss the advancements in that area. Below is a table that shows the topics chosen from the years 2011-2016. As we can see, there is a lot of emphasis on practices focusing on the core values and principles that are brought up in AGILE manifesto. Working with customers, training and coaching between the different styles of management, collaboration, coding practices among others ar ethe main focus of these conferencces. As we can notice, Lean and distributed agile are not consistent topics in the conference. I believe it is not the focus of many people to incorporate Lean into their AGILE framework as AGIILE itself is tedious to maintain. Having said that, the core focus of these conferences are on project and portfolio management. These interest both industry and academia for practice and research. Another topic that has seen high relevance and is of increasing importance to everyone is the study of enterprise AGILE. This refers to the practice of scaling AGILE up to bigger scenarios with more developers and more clients per developer. This would require a change in practices adopted at the companies. The next biggest trend is DevOps; this is an emerging topic for most of the community technologically. This is rather novel still and has not entirely been put into practice by companies yet. There is still literature being developed on this topic. The more general trend is towards communication between the operational and developmental sides of a company. A famous programming practice known as Extreme Programming(XP) is gaining traction in the scientific community and is often seen as the next step to extending the AGILE development scheme. In the XP framework we move even more rapidly than we do in distributed AGILE; and are constantly working on little bits of work and the analysis, design, implementation and testing phase. It blends all of them together to become a constant state of motion. Some basic features of XP are: *Small releases, system is re-released every few months *Simple design, communication between people is reduced to the essentials and whatever can be automated is automated so that developers focus solely on their work. This mindset moves into the production code as well, where code is not duplicated as much as possible *Refactoring, code is refactored to be as simple as possible *Collective ownership, every developer works with a shared responsibility of the code, even if he did not write it and aims to improve every piece of code in the system *Continuous integration, new code is tested, and quickly integrated into the system within a few hours The last feature especially is an important pardigm of XP. It is a general focus of AGILE systems to move towards a continuous deployment and continuous integration approach as this makes development faster overall and less constricted by the demands of the organization. Altogether, the trends seem to favour distributed AGILE greatly. XP is a paradigm shift that will emphasize faster development across the company and make workers break up their work into smaller chunks that are doable within a shorter frame of time. This gives greater scalability to a company. DevOps also proves to be beneficial because it develops an importance towards better build time and development tools. This is important in the long run. Other research areas in AGILE methodologies are in extending AGILE to other sectors of business like operations or manufacturing and making companies adopt more of the AGILE principles in their business practices. References: #Mishra, Alok & Garbajosa, Juan & Wang, Xiaofeng & Bosch, Jan & Abrahamsson, Pekka. (2017). Future directions in Agile research: Alignment and divergence between research and practice: Agile Product Development Special Issue Of J. Softw. Evol. And Proc.. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process. 29. e1884. 10.1002/smr.1884. #Beck, Kent. "Embracing change with extreme programming." Computer 32.10 (1999): 70-77. #Abrahamsson, Pekka, Kieran Conboy, and Xiaofeng Wang. "‘Lots done, more to do’: the current state of agile systems development research." (2009): 281-284. #Dingsøyr, Torgeir, and Casper Lassenius. "Emerging themes in agile software development: Introduction to the special section on continuous value delivery." Information and Software Technology 77 (2016): 56-60. #Tripp, John, Jeff Saltz, and Dan Turk. "Thoughts on Current and Future Research on Agile and Lean: Ensuring Relevance and Rigor." Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 2018.